Fatal North Read online

  Meyer stood silent but defiant.

  That evening, Dr. Emil Bessels asked to speak to Hall. He said that Meyer’s scientific duties were so pressing that he could not be spared for other work.

  Hall started at the audacious little German. Who did he think he was?

  “If the sergeant is put off the ship,” Bessels went on, “I will leave, too.”

  Word of the quarrel spread among the crew that night. The Germans were particularly alarmed, and after loudly discussing the situation with Bessels in their native tongue, they decided to a man that they would quit, too, should Bessels and Meyer leave the ship.

  Hall was stunned by the depth of the plot Bessels was stirring up to defy his authority. This was no longer just one crewman’s complaint about his duties. Hall understood it had turned into a test of his ability to command.

  If the Germans left, Hall knew the expedition would be over before it started. He could not possibly go on, as there would be no way to replace at the last minute the chief engineer, two of the three scientists, and seven of the ten ordinary seamen. After all the support the expedition had received at home, and the ceremonious sendoffs, they would limp back in defeat with only a partial crew. They would be a laughingstock, his reputation as Arctic explorer surely ruined.

  Hall spent the night brooding.

  He knew the face of insubordination; he had seen it before. In the summer of 1868, after four long years in the Arctic, tempers had flared between him and some of the seamen who had accompanied him to Repulse Bay in search of the lost Franklin expedition. Tension in the camp had been rising for days, and at one point several of his men were in a mutinous state. Their leader, Patrick Coleman, an American, planted himself in front of Hall and delivered a rebellious ultimatum. Trying to reason with Coleman, Hall placed a hand on his shoulder, but Coleman, a powerful, muscular man, squared off against his commander. Hall ran to his tent, picked up his revolver, and returned, demanding that the men end their insolence. When Coleman became more threatening, Hall snapped and impulsively pulled the trigger. Coleman staggered and fell. Hall, realizing what he had done, handed an Eskimo his revolver and helped the wounded man to his tent. Coleman did not die immediately, but lived on for a horrifying fortnight before succumbing to his wounds. During that time a remorseful and shaken Hall stayed at the man’s side, struggling vainly to save his life. Hall was never questioned by authorities about the shooting death; no one could determine under whose jurisdiction that remote region of the Arctic lay, and no one was much interested in finding out.

  In the morning, Hall, bleary-eyed and exhausted from worry and lack of sleep, felt he had no choice but to capitulate to Meyer. Hall summoned the meteorologist and told him he could continue taking observations; he’d find someone else to keep his journal.

  In a week, the Navy supply ship, USS Congress, arrived from New York with final provisions for Polaris, enough to restock her coal and food supplies before she continued her journey north. Arriving on Congress was the third and final member of the ship’s scientific corps, Richard W. D. Bryan, who assumed his dual role aboard Polaris as astronomer and chaplain. Bryan had been employed as an astronomer at an observatory in Michigan since his recent graduation from Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Recommended for the Polaris appointment by his alma mater, Byran had a freshly scrubbed look and youthful appeal, and his eagerness to do the right thing was irresistible even to the most hardened seaman. In addition, Byran was a young man of superior talent and intelligence who caught on very quickly.

  When Captain H. K. Davenport, the skipper of the Congress, stepped aboard Polaris in full uniform, regal and patrician, he was shocked to find officers openly at odds with their angry and mortified commander, and to learn that the long-planned and well-outfitted polar expedition had nearly been scuttled by mass desertion.

  Hall sought Davenport’s advice. After reviewing the Navy Department’s orders under which Polaris sailed, Davenport said that since the crew was subject to Navy discipline, he was prepared to arrest Meyer for insolence and return him to the U.S. in irons, adding that this example might go far to repairing Hall’s authority.

  Hall appreciated the offer but declined. He explained that the mission was more important than any one man. All he wanted to do was to get on his way to the Pole.

  At Davenport’s suggestion, Hall called Meyer into his cabin. The commander wrote out a paragraph from the navy’s official orders: “As a member of the United States naval North Polar Expedition, I do hereby solemnly promise and agree to conform to all the instructions as herein set forth by the Secretary of the United States Navy to the commander.” Hall asked Meyer to sign the statement, which the meteorologist did.

  Davenport was not finished. Knowing how insubordination could sweep through a ship like a deadly plague, he had Hall call all hands together on the deck the day that Polaris was to leave Disco, and the Congress skipper delivered a brief but ringing lecture on naval discipline. He was thinking not only about Meyer and Emil Bessels, but also of Sidney Buddington. Hall had told Davenport of having caught the sailing master stealing food for his own consumption. Captain Davenport hoped his comments served to remind the crew of their responsibilities, and felt he had done everything in his power. Still, he worried.

  The chaplain of Congress, the Reverend Doctor J. P. Newman, who had led a service aboard ship when President Grant’s party visited in Washington Navy Yard and had come up on the supply ship for a final farewell to the Polaris crew, stepped forward to offer a parting prayer. The first part of his blessing was suitable for any naval journey, but at the end the minister seemed to address what was happening aboard Polaris. He prayed for the men to have “noble thoughts, pure emotions, and generous sympathies for each other while so far away from human habitations.” From God he sought for them a charity that “suffereth long and is kind, that envieth not, that is not puffed up, not easily provoked, that thinketh no evil, but that endureth all things.”

  Then the visitors departed, Polaris weighed anchor, steamed from the Disco harbor, and turned north. The weather was fine and the seas calm, but many icebergs rode outside the harbor, and it required some skillful steering to avoid running afoul of them.

  As the polar-bound ship passed Congress, Davenport’s men cheered heartily.

  Most, but not all, of the Polaris crew standing on deck returned the greeting.

  In his benediction, the chaplain had offered a fitting prayer.

  For Polaris and her divided crew, endurance and survival near the top of the world would soon become paramount.

  4

  Destination: The Pole

  George Tyson had been prepared to quit the expedition in Greenland.

  After what he had seen taking place aboard Polaris the week they were at Disco, he decided that if his commission papers failed to arrive on the supply ship, he would pack his bag and disembark. That would be a valid reason for returning home, even though he would be without a job, as it was too late in the whaling season to pick up a sailing assignment.

  He surmised things would never work well between Hall and the scientific corps when they got north. Expressions were freely made by the two rebellious scientists that they, not their commander, would get credit for any discoveries of the expedition. My God, this is before they have discovered anything, Tyson thought bitterly. What will it be like when they really had something to fight over?

  Hall’s troubles with Emil Bessels did not surprise Tyson. Before the ship even left New York, he had noted a lack of mutual respect between the two. Bessels had been so outwardly discourteous to his superior officer that Tyson thought Hall would be justified in replacing the arrogant physician scientist before the expedition started. The well-educated and wealthy Bessels practiced a kind of intellectual and social snobbery toward not only lowly seamen but his own commander, whom he clearly considered ill-educated and well beneath his own station in life. Had he been in Hall’s place, Tyson would have had no qualms about ridding
his ship of the man that Hall had taken to calling “the little German dance master.”

  Other members of the crew seemed bound to go contrary, too. Whatever Hall wanted done was exactly what they would not do. All the Germans were sticking together, and even some of the officers had already decided how far north they would go. “Queer sort of explorers these!” Tyson scribbled in his journal.

  If this crew could not work together after only three weeks at sea, Tyson knew that matters would only get worse during the two long winters they were to be stuck in the ice pack. The resulting deprivations and close quarters would test the loyalty and stamina of even the most disciplined crew. With the Polaris crew already so divided—explorers versus scientists, sailors versus landlubbers, Americans versus Germans—how in the world would they survive?

  When his commission papers showed up on Congress, Tyson was somewhat disappointed, although not for long. Officially appointed to an officer’s billet, he felt obligated to Hall and to the Navy Department to help the voyage succeed. He would give it his very best, and gave no further thought to quitting.

  In Hall, Tyson saw a commander who was energetic, persevering, courageous, and, above all, unselfish. He was also beset with problems and embarrassments from which, at times, there seemed no way to free himself except by giving up all for which he had worked so long and so hopefully. Instead, Hall subsumed all distractions to the single ideal of pushing on to the Pole. He was a man possessed, and he would not allow his bright hopes of geographic conquest to be clouded by insubordination or other human frailties. He dreaded nothing so much as being delayed, or worse, compelled to return without setting foot at the top of the world. He was willing to die in his quest, but not to abandon the expedition.

  Three days out of Disco, the ship pulled into Upernavik, a small settlement on the upper western shore of Greenland, where Hall decided they would buy more dogs to fill out their complement of sixty needed to pull the sledges they had bought from native builders.

  Also, they were looking for one final addition to the crew: hunter and dog driver Hans Hendrik, a Greenland Eskimo who had been a member of two earlier expeditions to the Arctic, one under the command of Hall’s nemesis, Dr. Isaac Hayes, in 1860-61, and the other with the respected Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, in 1853-55. Although Hendrik had eventually deserted Kane to take a wife, Hall thought he would be good to have along to drive a dog team, and also to hunt for fresh meat on the tundra. Hall believed that Joe, Hannah, and Hans together would provide the expedition with an ample supply of Eskimo knowledge and skills, attributes he knew might one day be lifesaving.

  After Polaris anchored in the Upernavik harbor, first mate Chester Hubbard took a small boat ashore to find Hendrik and present him with Hall’s offer to join the expedition for a salary of $300 per annum. Hubbard’s assignment turned into an overnight mission, since Hendrik had gone to another small settlement a short distance up the coast.

  Hendrik accepted Hall’s offer but insisted that his family and worldly goods come, too. This included his wife, Merkut, a short, stout woman who, like her husband, spoke no English, and their three children, Augustina, twelve, Tobias, nine, and Succi, four. Crammed into the small launch when Chester returned with the Eskimo family were bags, boxes, and skins, on top of which rode the children, dressed in ragged dogskin clothing. They also brought tents, cooking utensils, tools, implements of Arctic hunting, including a rifle, and four Newfoundland puppies whose eyes could scarcely bear to look at light.

  Once they were deposited on deck, second mate William Morton stepped forward to greet Hans. About the same size as Joe, with similar dark chestnut coloring, Hendrik was cleanshaven and had high cheekbones. The grey-bearded Morton remembered his Eskimo guide from the Kane expedition almost twenty years before, but Morton had aged so in the intervening years that Hans did not recognize him. When Morton pointed to the scars on the Eskimo’s right hand and spoke of the gunpowder explosion on the shores of Smith Sound that had caused the burns, Hans finally placed him. Together, traveling by dog sledge, they had left the rest of the Kane expedition and reached Cape Constitution, where they were given their famous glimpse of the body of water they both were convinced was the open Polar Sea.

  Hall, infatuated with the notion of the Polar Sea being nothing less than the glorious gateway to the North Pole, was pleased to have as members of the expedition two intrepid men who had seen it.

  Reports reached them at Upernavik from a Swedish expedition conducting hydrographic surveys that the ice conditions in the north were still favorable to navigation. Upon hearing that very good news, Hall changed plans. Rather than proceeding westward through Jones Sound and taking a more circuitous route north, he decided to follow in Kane’s wake: striking north through Smith Sound, the route Morton and Hans had taken on the way to their discovery.

  It seemed like a good omen and outwardly invigorated the expedition commander.

  After divine services the day before leaving Upernavik, Hall openly addressed, for the first time, the hostilities that had been simmering aboard ship since Disco.

  “That man,” he said, pointing at Bessels, “is trying to make a disturbance amongst the company of this ship, and I want it known that I shall not tolerate it. Any more such conduct, Doctor, and I assure you, the authorities back home shall be properly advised.”

  Bessels glared at the deck, eyes gone cold, lips pressed tighdy together.

  Typically, the Polaris crew was divided in their reactions. American seaman Noah Hayes thought that Hall was simply “asserting his determination to maintain order and obedience to all lawful commands,” he wrote that day in his diary. German seaman Joseph Mauch, however, saw it as “insulting Dr. Bessels most severely.”

  Hall spun on his heel and marched off to his cabin.

  In his last dispatch to the Navy Department, on August 24, 1871, Charles Francis Hall sounded like his usual buoyant and determined self:

  The prospects of the expedition are fine; the weather beautiful, clear, and exceptionally warm. Every preparation has been made to bid farewell to civilization for several years, if need be, to accomplish our purpose. Our coal bunkers are not only full, but we have full ten tons yet on deck, besides wood, planks and rosin in considerable quantities, that can be used for steaming purposes in any emergency. Never was an Arctic expedition more completely fitted out than this…. The anchor of Polaris has just been weighed, and not again will it go down till, as I trust and pray, a higher, a far higher, latitude has been attained than ever before by civilized man. Polaris bids adieu to the civilized world. God be with us.

  The complement of Polaris was filled. Their final number was now thirty-three: seven officers, two mates, an assistant engineer, carpenter, cook, steward, two firemen to man the boilers, a deck force of ten ordinary seamen, and eight Eskimo men, women and children.

  Three days out at sea, Tyson came upon Hall writing furiously. Tyson knew that Hall had brought along his journals from his second Arctic expedition and intended to fill the long, empty hours of the trip working on a new book. Hall had previously authored Life with the Esquimaux, published in London, in 1864, about his first expedition in search of the survivors of Sir John Franklin’s expedition.

  “Writing up your new book, sir?” Tyson asked.

  “No, friend Tyson. I left those papers at Disco.”

  Tyson hesitated, not wanting to press his commander to explain.

  The unspoken question registered with Hall, even though he didn’t look up. A sort of gloom fell over him. Without lifting his head, he said ominously, “I left them there for safety.”

  Tyson would later learn that Hall had left his valuable papers with the inspector-general of North Greenland for safekeeping. That day Tyson made no further remark, but he could not help thinking about the incident. To the rest of the world, Hall remained upbeat, a man on a mission. But inside, the events that had transpired with the crew had obviously taken their toll. Tyson had to wonder, did the expedition commander have
a premonition of a coming calamity?

  Onward they went, north, as Hall was wont to do.

  From the deck, the men could see ice gathering into packs in the channels—frighteningly huge packs that, pushed by high winds and seas, could easily collide with the ship. Beyond rose the stark coastal mountains of Greenland, inhospitable to all but the hardiest of God’s creatures.

  An occasional humpback whale surfaced, regarded them briefly, then flipped its big tail as if in dismissal and dived back down to the deep.

  They passed a party of walruses basking on floes close by. While most of the large, ungainly creatures enjoyed their sleep, some of their number remained on watch to give the alarm in case of approaching danger. The vessel made little noise, and the lookouts of the walrus party evidently did not consider her dangerous, for their only sign of apprehension was a more frequent raising and rolling about of their heads. The rest of the company of walrus remained undisturbed except for the occasional one turning over lazily.

  Meanwhile, all was excitement aboard Polaris. Many had never before seen the animals, and they were intrigued by their appearance and actions. Even those who had often captured them hurried to the side to get a nearer view of the sleepers. Joe, animated by the love of blood sport, readied himself in the bow with his rifle. It was proposed to Hall to man a boat and attempt the capture of at least one of the walruses, but he decided that this would delay the vessel too much.

  Joe and several others took pot shots at the animals, who came suddenly awake. None were hurt, since it is almost impossible to kill a walrus from the front, unless one was lucky enough to hit an eye. Their skulls are very thick, except on the crown of the head, which is a difficult point to strike.

  The sky was at times hypnotic. Crew members fixed their gaze upward as wide plumes of light, shaped like tornadoes, hung frozen overhead, turning into greenish, shivering bands of light strung out seemingly amid the stars, then exploding in great white clusters across the horizon.